e fell on the poem about the hand of Lacenaire, the
cold yellow hand "_du supplice encore mal lavee_," with its downy red
hairs and its "_doigts de faune_." He glanced at his own white taper
fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he
came to those lovely stanzas upon Venice:--

"Sur une gamme chromatique,
Le sein de perles ruisselant,
La Venus de l'Adriatique
Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.

"Les domes, sur l'azur des ondes
Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
S'enflent comme des gorges rondes
Que souleve un soupir d'amour.

"L'esquif aborde et me depose,
Jetant son amarre au pilier,
Devant une facade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier."

How exquisite they were! As one read them, one seemed to be floating
down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black
gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. The mere lines looked to
him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one
pushes out to the Lido. The sudden flashes of colour reminded him of the
gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall
honey-combed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through the
dim, dust-stained arcades. Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he kept
saying over and over to himself:--

"Devant une facade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier."

The whole of Venice was in those two lines. He remembered the autumn
that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to
mad, delightful follies. There was romance in every place. But Venice,
like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true
romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. Basil had
been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret. Poor
Basil! what a horrible way for a man to die!

He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget. He read of
the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at Smyrna where the
Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke
their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of
the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in
its lonely sunless exile, and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered
Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures
with gilded claws, and crocodiles, with small beryl eyes, that crawl
over